Moving past the confines of typical suburban life

Ambition, Drive, and Burn Out

It’s been a bit since I posted an actual update here. I set a goal to post regularly here at the beginning of the year. The weekly updates proved an easy way to do it.

Over the past few years, Fins shouted, repeatedly, that I was running myself into the ground. I didn’t realize it for a while, but 4 years ago I left a frustrating job for an even more stressful one. I wanted out of corporate America to do something more interesting. The opportunities for advancement seemed endless.

I’m not sure when the new gig took a turn for the worse. The first year or so centered around building and releasing a cool product. For the longest time, I’ve defined success in my profession as “getting products out the door”. When company tasked a team to build a new product, but failed to create an environment to build it, the end result was a slow, lingering, failure.

They’ve since tried to address several of the perceived root causes, but, I feel, in negative ways.

In the end, the new job proved both stressful and frustrating, and that was too much. I’ve left and gone back to corporate America. Funny enough, my current big company allows me to talk a bit about working there (with a few caveats). They do require me to add a disclaimer though.

The opinions of this blog are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions, business practices, plans, etc… of my employer.

I’ve changed it slightly from the HR mandated version on account of not actually acknowledging who they are here. If you figure it out, then there usual disclaimer applies. In any case, this blog isn’t about whizz-bang ultra cool electronic gadgets.

Fate & Fin are entering yet another “building year”, but with a renewed focus. The past several months have been hard for both of us. On the positive side, I spent some time analyzing whats important, where Fin and I want to go, and how we’re going to get there.

Fin has informed me that I’m not allowed to make any new big plans right now. So, I won’t promise to more interesting / better content here. However, I’m now working toward a new priority: getting healthy. I read multiple times about burnout, and never really figured it could impact so many different areas of my health the way it has. Until it did.

In the past I’ve had goals along the lines of ‘get up earlier’, ‘work out more’, ‘eat healthier’. Little did I realize that those goals would be difficult or impossible without asking why I feel a need to sleep in more, why do I have little desire to work out, and why do I crave constant junk food.